snow – Avon Stories

Vik’s photos of the Avon snow day

Back in March we had that unseasonable, surprise snow day, and Vik and I walked along the Avon and up into Leigh Woods. I’m still thinking of how the falling snow sounded on the evergreen leaves, and how it felt under my feet – powdery and perfect.

Vik loves to use her toy cameras – plastic lensed, cheaply made medium format cameras, mostly the Holga and Diana, with no settings, and a ton of idiosyncrasies, like lightleaks, and the way the back of the camera will fall off for no apparent reason. And with a ridiculously low ISO film, on a day without all those snow-clouds overhead, she wasn’t set up well, so only took two photos. But wow, they’re gorgeous!

Compare them to my photos from the walk – and check out more of Vik’s photos over on her flickr and her instagram.

Snowy walk along the closed Avon path

Last Saturday the snow was still around, and I went walking in it with my friends Kate and Tim. They’d never been down the closed part of the Avon footpath, or seen the Netham Weir, which is there to try to stop the Avon being tidal, so off we went.

Map of our walk:

And photos too. If you mouse over/click on the first photo it should open the slideshow, or you can go directly to the flickr album.

Continue reading “Snowy walk along the closed Avon path”

Snow day Avon

Because we’re on the water, and in the south, it doesn’t often snow in Bristol, and if it does, it rarely sticks, so the huge “Beast from the East” snowmaggedon was a huge deal here, that I’m sure people in Scotland and the Frozen North are rolling their eyes at. But not having to get anywhere, with a warm house and a stocked pantry, it was a ton of fun, just for a weekend.

On Friday Vik and I walked along the Avon and up to Stokeleigh Camp, the Iron Age fort in Leigh Woods, and back. While the parks and slopes were full of children sledging, once we got to the Avon footpath, it was really empty, with much less traffic on the Portway than usual. All the interesting layers pulled into focus, outlined by snow, from the terraces of Hotwells, to the striations of the Gorge.

Up in the woods it was pretty magical, with everything so quiet we could hear the falling snow hit the evergreen and remaining dead autumn leaves. We walked around the Fort walls and talked about what it might have been like to live there, as the wind blew swirls of snowflakes off the drifts on top of the earthworks. As we walked home, a skier passing us on the Nightingale Valley path, the tracks we and others had made were already covered in snow, and it felt like we were the first people to walk on the path, and on the silt banks. It was a gorgeous day.

Photos are in the album – mouse over/click the first image to get the slideshow, or go straight to flickr.